When
Apple adopts a new bus interface, you can bet that there will be companies
waiting in a line to support the standard with new peripherals for users.
The new
MacBook Pros debuted yesterday and along with the new machines came a new I/O
interface called Thunderbolt.

Promise
has announced that it has the first new hardware RAID solution for the
Thunderbolt interface with its new line of gear in the Pegasus
series. The Promise line was designed to provide users with raw speed and
is optimized for media and entertainment users. The Pegasus gear will come in
4-bay and 6-bay enclosures and will support up to 12TB of storage.

“Intel is excited about the superior performance and simplicity Thunderbolt
technology and PROMISE’s Pegasus family of products will bring to consumers and
media professionals trying to keep up with the explosion of digital media,”
said Jason Ziller, Director, Thunderbolt Planning and Marketing, Intel
Corporation.

The Thunderbolt interface supports speeds of 800MB/s sustained, which is 12x
faster than FireWire 800 and 20x faster than USB 2.0 ports. The RAID solutions
are aimed at professionals that need to store and edit video and play multiple
streams of uncompressed 8 and 10-bit HD video on the new MacBook Pro notebooks.
The storage solutions are compatible with Time Machine as well.

“PROMISE is thrilled to deliver one of the first peripherals to feature the
blazing speed of Thunderbolt technology,” said James Lee, CEO, PROMISE
Technology. “Pegasus brings groundbreaking RAID performance to creative
professionals in the studio, on location and in the home. Pegasus is the
ultimate complement to PROMISE’s extensive storage offerings ranging from the
Apple qualified VTrak subsystems to DS4600 – Direct Attached Storage for home,
SOHO and AV professionals.”

Multiple Pegasus enclosures can be connected to one another to extend storage
capacity up to 72TB or a display can be connected to the storage device as
well. RAID modes supported include RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60. Each Pegasus
device has two Thunderbolt ports onboard. Pricing is unannounced at this time,
but the solutions will land in Q2.

LaCie
unveiled a smaller storage solution yesterday with a Little
Big Disk version with Thunderbolt support.

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Top rated SDD is currently the OCZ Z-Drive R2 M84 rated at 700MS/s read access for a mere 1029$. If you want cheaper you can always go the dual-raid 64GB SDD route with corsair rated at 270MB/s speed for 129$ a piece.Of course there are internal drivesI don't know how fast you can get with standard HDD for serious storage space but it seems to me that thunderbolt is overkill.

Absolutely correct. Fiberchannel systems have much higher bandwith than LightPeak\. The poster above is only considering the transfer rate from one hard drive, but on machines with more than 1 drive, or banks of drives providing information, that bandwith becomes essential.

In the bandwidth department, Thunderbolt beats 4Gb FC interfaces and only 8Gb fiber channel interfaces have a higher bandwidth, so it could handle a bank of drives just fine from a bandwidth perspective. However, this technology is not meant to compete against FC. That said, the cost of a 4Gb FC card, let alone an 8Gb one is very high and outside of the range of the average consumer. Thunderbolt not only sits between 4Gb FC and 8Gb FC from a bandwidth perspective, but it also has the potential of encapsulating multiple protocols (which FC cards can't) at a fraction of the price of a FC interface. You can see why this technology looks like a winner for the consumer.

Not quite right. The fastest Fiber Channel connections are 8 Gb/s while Light Peak is 10 Gb/s. This is theoretical maximum of course. Who knows what the actual file throughput will be. I guess it depends on how efficient the Light Peak protocol is. Hopefully it doesn't completely suck like USB, where you're lucky if the actual throughput is 50% of theoretical.

Actually it is you who is wrong. Think about what you just said. Yes every 8 bits makes a byte. So what's your point? How is a sustained rate of 800MB/s wrong?

Let me do some quick math for you. The current iteration of Thunderbolt/Light Peak has a theoretical maximum of 10Gb/s bi-directional. That is 1.25GB/s. That is 1280MB/s. Now we all know you never get the theoritical maximum with any bus, so 800MB/s seems to be the number Intel has found that is sustainable and expected.

Your post is trying to imply the the author should have either posted 100MB/s or 800Mb/s... can I simply ask, are you ignorant of what Light Peak is? You currently can get 100MB/s sustained out of most of WD/Seagate HDDs on a SATA I (1.5Gbps) bus.

I'm not entirely sure why you brought up SSDs to counter the practicality of Thunderbolt with a RAID setup. You know what RAID is right? Array of multiple disks for either redundancy or performance in striping?

The reason why the huge bandwidth of Thunderbolt is useful is for a multiple disk setup such as, drum roll, a RAID array. An external RAID array, one that is probably more affordable than what is out there without looking at the SAN offerings of OEMS with Windows Home Server. And even then you're limited to Gbit Ethernet at best.

There are probably lots of home users who have large stores of media that they would prefer never too lose considering a hard drive can die anytime. And yes, a hard drive, because when it comes to mass storage, you don't need the performance of a SSD.

"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." -- Bill Gates